Auto Check Disk & Very Slow Boot

Thank you all for your ideas. I will try the ones I haven't tomorrow.

As for the IT person, let's just say I was given the responsibility mid-term unexpectedly and am challenged to fix and maintain as needed.

The machines are 5-year old IBMs, each with two XP Pro OSes and three drives. I have never imagined a wackier bunch of machines. Most of the 40 work fine, but 5 or 6 have their problems. A few "rejected" the SP2 installation, but most have been upgraded, have all updates and work well enough.

One other thing I should mention about the machine in question is that I noticed that while it is being used there is a click-tick, click-tick sound coming from it, the same sound it makes when it's turned on, like a relay clicking. I'm thinking now that maybe something is physically wrong with something mechanical. What would cause a sporadic click-tick when the hard drive gets busy?

Thanks again, I will experiment with it some more tomorrow.

I tried all suggestions here. Thanks again. Finally, I realized that it was the F drive that was being "check disked" at every start up. A deliberate "check disk" on that drive, including automatically fixing errors, ended in allowing me to defrag it. Now Check Disk does not run at start up, so that problem is (I believe) solved, but the boot up time still takes 4 or 5 times the norm. The hard disk seems to be busy sorting things out, but the whole boot takes 5 or 6 minutes.

I didn't have enough time today, but I'm hoping that I can get it settled into a tolerable boot cycle.

If there is anything else I might try, please let me know.

Thanks again.

It was a trick I worked out with my old Windows ME machine some years ago. It had a C drive and a 2nd hard disk partitioned into D, E and F drives, (why I did that then I don't know!). Often on a system crash or failed shutdown it would slip into the Check Disk cycle for one or the other of the disks on a reboot. I learned to carry out a "quick" check on them all whenever this happened. I'm not sure if the quick check is available on XP and above.

Now to the other problems.

Is that machine still ticking? If so, then maybe that drive F is on it's way out. That might explain the constant error checking. What happens if you remove that disk temporarily? Does the ticking go away, and does the boot time improve?

You don't say what's on that F drive, but if it is important, you may want to back it up before disconnecting it. Disconnecting may send it south finally if it is heading that way.

If that doesn't solve the boot time then we need to move on to "Unwanted Startup programs and Services". Grif's guidance on "How to shut down unnecessary startup programs" here may help.

That guidance also talks about stopping unnecessary services.

Let us know how you get on.

Mark

These machines all have a C and F hard drive, with XP Pro installed on each. (I have no idea why -- anyone can freely access either.)

The trouble with this particular machine is with the F drive, and I guess from the clicking sounds (as you said) that the F drive is going away. Even though it doesn't go through check disk anymore and everything else checks out, it still takes about 10 minutes to fully boot. I'm just going to accept that the disk is shot and see if the school wants to bother repairing it or not.

Thanks for the help.